Titania Inglis, a 33-year-old fashion designer who wears her own flouncy avant-garde creations, likes to take the East River Ferry from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she keeps her work samples, to the East 34th Street slip in Manhattan and then bicycle to the garment center. Indeed, Ms. Inglis, who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, can wax rhapsodic about the pleasures of sailing on a swift tidal river glistening with sunlight.
“It’s about having a fun commute,” she said, as she wheeled her bicycle off the ferry arriving at 4:10 p.m. at the India Street pier in Greenpoint. “The wind in your hair, watching the skyline come toward you as you approach Midtown and getting to see New York from this vantage point.”
But she was one of only three people to get off that ferry. And the same number got on.
Even at the start of the 5 p.m. rush hour, the commuters getting off and on could be counted on one hand. Though the numbers are more robust during the morning rush hours — on Monday, 14 people caught the 8:39 ferry to Pier 11 near Wall Street and 21 caught the 8:40 to East 34th Street — they still raise questions about the popularity and profitability of the service as a whole. The ferries can hold 149 passengers.
Riders almost universally love the seven-stop ferry service, and the city has bet $9 million in subsidies that over a three-year contract, the service will win converts and prompt development in the vicinities of five ferry landings along the reviving industrial waterfront in Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Long Island City, Queens. But after more than a year of operations, the verdict on whether the service will sustain itself is far from clear.
The number of riders on the service as a whole is growing; in its first year, beginning in June 2011, 1.2 million passengers rode the ferries, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which oversees the service. Many of those were tourists who used the boats as a cheap sightseeing vehicle — there is a free bus that takes riders from 34th Street at Avenue of the Americas to the river pier — and families who saw the boats as a weekend pleasure cruise, one reason the service is deploying 399-passenger models for weekends.
But it is not yet apparent that the ferries can become a daily habit for enough people to keep New York Waterway, which operates the ferry, from losing money, as it has on some other routes. Hunters Point in Long Island City and Schaefer Landing in southern Williamsburg contribute even fewer passengers than Greenpoint, while northern Williamsburg and Dumbo, Brooklyn, are the ridership leaders.
The service, which at peak hours runs boats every 20 minutes at each pier, functions especially well for residents of Brooklyn and Queens who live a short walk from the ferry and have jobs or attend schools near the ferry’s two stops in Manhattan. Riders pay $4 a ride, almost double the subway fare, though an unlimited $140 monthly pass reduces the expense. (Having to add subway fare on top of the ferry cost deters many riders, experts say.)
A three-year effort to run a five-stop ferry service on the East River foundered in 2011 because without city subsidies, the revenue ridership was not sufficient to pay for the costs, said Tom Fox, former president of New York Water Taxi, which ran the service. Most transit services, like the subways, buses and the Staten Island Ferry, operate with some sort of government subsidies, but the current East River subsidy is assured for only three years.
“It’s difficult to tell what a break-even point would be, but to be successful waterborne transportation would have to have some kind of subsidy because you’re competing against a $2.25 subway,” Mr. Fox said.
Paul Goodman, the chief executive of BillyBey Ferry Company, the division of New York Waterway that operates the East River service, acknowledged that the subsidy had “enabled frequency of schedule and a price point that makes the service very accessible.”
Seth W. Pinsky, president of the Economic Development Corporation, compared the new service’s use to the early days of the subways when lines were built in sparsely populated farmland and the development of apartment houses gradually followed to pack those lines. In cultivating ridership, he said, it was important to have predictable, regular service, so he plans to work with the City Council to extend the ferry service beyond the three-year contract until sufficient ridership is developed.
“If you look at earlier experiments, the service was sporadic and infrequent,” he said. “People didn’t become habituated.”
The Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who is expected to be a leading candidate for mayor in 2013, has been a booster, calling the response by riders “nothing short of a tidal wave.”
At the India Street pier, riders said they had heard about the service through word-of-mouth or by chance. That means many other residents of the neighborhoods it serves may not understand that it is indeed a viable and far more peaceful alternative to the subway. (In these areas, the G is the only subway line and it does not go into Manhattan.)
Greenpoint is a neighborhood of old row houses and warehouses whose population of 40,000 is a mixture of immigrant Poles, hipsters and, increasingly, people who wear business attire to work. Like Williamsburg before it, the neighborhood has suddenly acquired a counterintuitive cachet and, as a result of a 2005 zoning change, thousands of new condominiums are expected to replace idle or underused industrial buildings. City leaders are hoping that these newcomers take the ferry.
Regular riders are enthusiastic.
Noah Kraft, a broad-shouldered, redheaded 25-year-old who describes himself as a media entrepreneur, called the ferry a “lifesaver” because it made his frequent business trips “incredibly easy.”
“You get the homeyness and neighborhoodness of being in Greenpoint and still have the city at your fingertips,” he said. “Having that dichotomy is really beautiful, not to mention that there’s great joy in being on the water and not underground.”
